God! Please Bring Me More Suffering!

Class: 4:15-5:15pm, "Happy Hour", Alison.

My teacher today was someone I rarely take from but whom I love--(she is brown skinned and tiny and muscular and her face is all almond eyes and strong cheekbones)--and so I should have been happy to have found the hour to be with her, to watch her sinewy body against the gray outside and to practice there with her, but I was not. Because I watched her today, all through class, as through some waterfall..."as through a window. On one side of the glass, happy untroubled people, on the other side--you" (John Patrick Shanley). This is how class was for today--me, wishing so much I could be there, really be there, and be pulled from the muck of my worry--but unable all the same.

I near my 21-month anniversary of an almost daily yoga practice. These days I can hold my own in the most advanced classes. I still can't do a handstand in the middle of the room, but I can do a hundred things I never would have thought possible. These days it is rare that I do not leave behind what ails me within the first several minutes of class.... But, today was an exception. Today I listened with one ear to my teacher and listened with my other ear to the angry struggle taking place between my forehead and the back of my neck. Today I could have cared less. Today I flew through the asanas, absolutely unwilling to stop. And breathe. And feel. Today I refused to let my practice in. My body felt good and open after a day or two of rest from the more vigorous classes and I marveled at the fluidity of it, even in the midst of my mind's turmouil.

There was a point, a couple years ago, at which a daily and vigorous physical practice of some kind, any kind, became desperately necessary in my life. I was suffering from an anxiety theretofore incomprehensible to me...anxiety like a constant cloud above my head. My boyfriend encouraged me, during this bout of panic, to start taking yoga every day. Up until that point I had a yoga practice that was...sporadic. At best. I had a couple of yoga videos on my shelf and memories of a class I had taken (my very first) for several months nearly 4 years prior. Since then, I had not stepped foot in a classroom. My boyfriend told me that when he had suffered from an extended bout of anxiety in his youth, a doctor had ordered him to go out and do something fun and active for one hour every day. He reminded me that anxiety is pent-up energy, and that getting out and sweating a bit of it off every day could only help me. Besides, I claimed to love yoga (what I knew of it), and had often complained that I could not (would not) find the time to do it.

As soon as I stepped foot into my studio, I knew I had found the right place to practice. I still get that feeling, everytime I step onto the third floor, head down the hallway to the studio, and open the door to be washed by the smell of incense and bare clean feet. This studio is unlike any other I have been to, before or since, and I will hold tight to my claim that it is the best, most creative, most welcoming and most challenging place to practice in New York City. My heart jumps a little bit in my chest every time I walk through the door...knowing that we are in for something together, my heart and I. It's amazing to me how the body knows things, and how it can recognize a sanctuary so immediately.

So, I was compelled back into practice. I was desperate to reconnect with myself and to shake off at least some of the weight of the heavy coat I felt like I was suddenly every day wearing. And, I did not expect some revelatory change. I did not expect to slide into downdog and watch my anxiety slide right along with me, onto the floor and into a million pieces. I did not expect that, and that's not what happened.

The story of the evolution of this...anxiousness...is a long one and too personal and too indulgent and much much much too boring to tell here, but I will say that it did not take long for my practice to develop into something seperate and necessary in its own right. The thrill of watching my body respond and lengthen and open began to overshadow the I need this feeling with which I had first entered the studio. But, also, the physical side effects of the anxiety began to diminish and diminish. Even on days when I could not seem to stop spinning my wheels, even on days when I felt only half-present in my practice, still the feeling diminished and diminished. Still my body felt more calm, more open when I left class than it had when I went in. Even if I refused to let go of my worry for the entire hour or hour and half, even then, as if against my own will, still things began to change and loosen.

But, as I said, today was an exception.

We are asked, as yogis, to embrace all the qualities of our existence, to embrace and to desire all that we have, including the yuck. A teacher once cried out to us again and again in class, with the most joyful exuberance, "God! Please bring me more suffering! God! Please bring me more suffering!" We are charged to approach our lives with this much openness and delight...to bite down into all the juicy meat of it...And though I would like to rail against my own failings...rail against the fact that I still, two years later, still am susceptible to days of what feels like never-ending worry...as much as I would like to do that I am stopped, utterly stalled, by something undeniable: I have been given a gift.

It is none other than this worry, which I claim to despise and want only to leave me, that led me to my practice. This worry, this black-mark on what I consider an otherwise clean record (ha!), is the reason I am where I am today. Since that day, two years ago, when I first began to suffer from this somewhat unnameable fear, I have turned my life around in ways too numerous even to name. And though I convince myself that I am failing, again and again, for not having rid myself entirely of all traces, how can I forget that without this worry I would never have lept so wildly into my practice. I would not have read the books which have broken my heart these last years. I would not have returned to my family with arms so much wider than they have been before. I would not have changed my financial life. I would not have written five plays and a novel. I would not have lived and struggled and fought and loved with my love. I would not have questioned and doubted and sought after God. I would not have cultivated the several beautiful friendships that now blossom in my life and, I would not have faced the past with such painful honesty. I would not have learned that it is, indeed, possible to walk around in the world hurting and ungaurded--and survive. I would not have learned that there are things I am afraid of that are unexplainable and unsolvable and I would not have learned that the most beautiful by-product of pain is compassion.

-YogaLia